Sunday, 4 March 2012

I had the opportunity to sit down earlier today with Dan Kline, game developer and frequent commenter on this blog, and have a great chat about procedural content generation in games. He's posted it up on his blog: feel free to pop over and have a listen.

Thanks to all 59 of you who voted (wow! That's a lot of developers). The results were:

Assert

18 (30%)

Try/Throw/Catch

41 (69%)

For the next poll, which up and coming roguelike (-like) are you the most looking forward to at the moment? I've deliberately picked games which are on the unconventional side; this isn't intended to be a JADE versus the next Incursion poll. Links to the games will be in the next post.

I'm surprised there's not more games that explore the fertile boundaries between roguelikes (which are almost always tactical) and the strategy genre. The latest Three Moves Ahead podcast features Conquest of Elysium 3, which the panel headed by Troy Goodfellow (a well known Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup fan) describe the game as a strategy roguelike in the sense that it is a strategy game firmly embedded in roguelike randomness: not just procedurally generated maps, but the emergent strangeness and unexpected behaviours of the genre we love. 7 Cities of Gold is cited as the closest relative, but I immediately thought of Expedition: The New World which is inspired by the same source, but much more in the roguelike tradition. I guess Pirates would be the other series to be so obviously inspired by these ideas. Strange Worlds of Infinite Space and its sequel hew to the same kind of play, but the playfulness and over-randomness of Weird Worlds means that the strategy element falls away. I'm have a feeling Space Rangers and Space Rangers 2 (despite containing a full RTS sub game) and Space Rangers 2.5 Spore do the same.